DS Truth
by Thor2000
Summary: Dr. Sam Beckett of Project: Quantum Leap has leaped into Willie Loomis during his infamous rendezvous with the past, and the experience leads Sam and Al to learn more about the Collins Family than any one else.
1. Default Chapter

It was a cemetery in a small but not so tiny New England town on the Maine coast. Well after dusk, the fishermen tied up their boats and sold their catches for nights of swearing, drinking and gambling. One of them did not join in that ritual and instead stole away to the oldest cemetery in town where the dark shadows and spindly trees reached out over acres of tombstones lit only by moonlight concealed by clouds. Careful not to rouse the caretaker, Willie Loomis looked across Eagle Hill Cemetary before he entered the Collins Mausoleum. He wanted money, and he wanted it fast! The Collins Family here were buried with all sorts of jewels. Joshua had been buried with a ceremonial sword. Naomi with family heirlooms. It was such a waste that they'd be sealed up with all those riches going to pot. They surely didn't need them where they was. It wasn't like they would mind if he took them.

Equipped with crowbar and a ship's pulley, he first tried breaking into the tomb of Joshua Collins who had died in 1812, but that was sealed tight. Ceremonial swords were too easily traced anyway, but jewelry was not and it was much easier to sell too. Pulling on the seals of Naomi's tomb, Willie hung a pulley on one of the rings in the tomb and attached a hook to the outer seal of the middle crypt. That in place, he grabbed the rope and gave it a yank. Pulling in yanking, he heard it creaking and moving, but it wasn't the crypt. That was still sealed tight, but pulling on the ring.... that opened something! He watched as the seal remained stuck, but the ring and its secret lock mechanism had been pulled down. Part of the wall ground had opened before him...........

A door ! He couldn't believe it! What incredible luck! Why else would anyone put a door in here if but to hide something ! He picked up his flashlight and shone it inside. The beam of light bounced around the vault a minute and then fell on a coffin. It was bound up in chains. Why would anyone put chains on a coffin unless they were trying to keep someone out ?! That proved their were riches in here ! Trading a casket for a chest wasn't good enough to scare him off. Grinning ear to ear, he grabbed his crowbar and put it into place. Carefully scraping and trying to snap but one link in the chain keeping the casket sealed. For a second he stopped, he thought he'd heard a woman's ghostly voice out in the cemetery, but it had to be an albatross, this lousy town on the Maine coast was covered with them. After that, screech, something else began creeping up on him.

Now, he didn't feel as if he was alone. He felt the universe opening up around him and the sensation of someone passing through him. His vision dimmed as somewhere in time and space he traded places with  
someone else. Someone else not who had left his earthly remains in this cemetery, but someone else from another time and space now arriving to exchange plaes with him. He gripped the crowbar as someone took his place. he felt as if he did not know who he was. The new person in the tomb looked around the guano-covered mausoleum floor and up to the ceiling whose eaves served as home for the bats slipping in and out of the cracks in the rafters. His eyes noticed and scanned down to the crowbar under the link of the chain. Maybe he was an archaeologist... anything to convince him he wasn't a grave robber. He dropped the tool as he stepped back in shock at the casket he almost violated. He was just in the nick of time on this one...

"Oh boy."


	2. Chapter 2

2

His name was Dr. Samuel Beckett and in the words of his best friend: "he was part of a experiment in time-traveling that went a little ca-ca," and forced him to jump in and out of the lives of different people in the timrestream. It wasn't exactly had in mind when her formulated his theory and tried to send himself back in time. As far as his own resourcefulness, he was in the tiny town of Collinsport, Maine and it was almost midnight. He didn't know exactly what year it was, but by the license plates on the period cars, it was either 1967 or 1968. He wandered through the main street a minute until he noticed a bar and grill out on the wharf called "The Blue Whale." It struck some sort of chord in him as he wandered in and sat down at the counter.

"What'll you have, Willie?" The bartender asked.

"Willie?" Sam looked about then noticed the reflection of who he was now in the mirror in front of him. He was a short, brawny fellow with short brown hair and a round face. "A beer." He looked to the bartender.

"Let me see the money first." The man did not trust Willie, and Sam was starting to suspected it. The worried time-traveler dove his hands into Willie's pockets and pulled out slips of paper, but no cash. He looked up defeatedly.

"I'll put it on McGuire's tab." The bartender filled a mug. Jason McGuire was Willie's ne'er-do-well crony, another opportunist in this small New England time of hard-working fishermen and struggling artists.

"Thanks." Sam looked into the reflection across the bar. The reflection of Willie looked scrawny with a chiseled look and small beady eyes. He looked like a punk. Sam wondered what his last name was.

"Loomis!" Someone yelled and Sam looked behind him at the person coming at him with that angry booming voice. IHe was a big guy with a barrel chest and a profile like a craggy cliff. Two dark eyes looked out from a heavy scowl looming over him. "Joe and I are over there with Maggie and Vicki." His voice cooled with restrained anger. "Now, we're not going to have any trouble out of you, are we?"

"Uhhhh, no." Sam was now wondering just what sort of character was this Willie Loomis!

"Good." His antagonist obviously didn't expect that remark. "You just finish your beer, and get out."

"Not a problem." Sam grinned as non-threatening as possible. Turning back, he recognized his best friend standing in the middle of the counter smoking a cigar. The bartender didn't see him and neither did anyone else. The cigar-smoking figure just walked through the counter like a ghost wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt. Sam was struck a bit unprepared for him.

"That guy..." he started. "Reminds me of the brother of my third... no, my second… no, third wife. He was a major..."

"Al!" Sam stopped his rambling. "Just tell me what I'm here for!"

"What?" Al smoked off some puffs as he raised the comlink in his hand. "Your name is William Hollingshead Loomis... Hollingshead? I bet he got beat up a lot in school. It's April 17, 1967 and that was Burke Devlin, an exxon...Exxon?" He shook the screaming comlink. "Ex-con! He's an ex-con out on good behavior. Loomis also has a criminal record."

"Wonderful." Sam sipped his beer. Behind him, Burke, Joe, Maggie and Vicki watched the performance as the person they thought they knew as Willie Loomis responding to his invisible friend. Was this a new thing they hadn't discovered from the rowdy reprobate.

"He's barely touched his beer!" Maggie noticed wondering if he was inebriated.

"What is he doing?" Burke started to worry as the man they thought was Willie Loomis had a conversation with thin air with a hologram from the future they could not see. Willie stopped and noticed them as if the invisible person had noticed them first. A nervous wave between them and Sam got up and moved to the telephone. Taking it off the hook, he continued talking to his holographic friend and remembered that only he could see him.

"Al, just tell me why I'm here!" He whispered.

"Well, Ziggy doesn't know."

"I knew it!" Sam raised his voice as he and Joe briefly locked eyes. "Why can't you ever come in and say, 'Sam, you are here to....'"

"Ziggy really doesn't know." Al admitted. "Sam, in the original history, Loomis came to town with one Jason McGuire; they're both in the Merchant Marines. After Mcguire departs town, Loomis got a job on the estate, but he's later arrested and institutionalized for kidnapping a Margaret Elizabeth Evans, a local waitress..... In fact, she's that that doe-eyed goddess right over there..........." Al found himself mooning over Maggie from over time and space. In his own time period, she was possibly already in her late Fifties to late Sixties.

"Al!"

"What?" Al regained his composure. "Oh, but he only did about a month of his sentence before he is released back into the custody of a Barnabas Collins. He ends up as Collins caretaker, a job in the company, marries a Carolyn Collins Stoddard and has a bunch of kids. Everything turns out great for him."

"Maybe..." Sam looked to Maggie then back to Al and his fake phone call. "I'm here to keep him from kidnapping Maggie."

"Maybe.... but that's still almost a year from now...." Al puffed his cigar as he used his link to the history files in the far future he was from. "Let's see if...uh-oh!!"

"Uh-oh? I hate it when you say uh-oh!!" Sam fretted as he had come to read Al's reactions.

"You must have changed history, Sam!" Al's face contorted with fear. "Loomis now gets killed in bar fight and, Carolyn gets mauled to death by an unidentified animal!"

"What?!" Sam tried to see the comlink.

"Her mother is...accidentally buried alive!! Her uncle dies in a car crash. Her cousin is kidnapped by his mother! There's a certain Dr. Julia Hoffman killed by a violent mute! Where the heck did she come from? Maggie is later found murdered in a ritualistic sacrifice!!!" His voice kept rising with the disasters he predicted and the Collins family history altered. "Victoria Winters vanishes into no where, and Barnabas Collins and Quentin Collins............." Al looked up in a spooky shock. "Cease to exist along with all of their children and descendants."

"Al." Sam tried to remain logical in the face of fear. "I haven't done or seen anything since I leaped into the mausoleum!"

"Mausoleum?" Al looked like he was losing it. "Why do I have this creepy, crawly feeling?" He punched a button on his comlink and checked for the facts on this mausoleum. "Sam, the only mausoleum in town is at Eagle Hill Cemetery, and it belongs to................the Collins Family."

A crack of thunder struck ominously somewhere.

"Ohhhhhhhhhhh boy." They chorused together.


	3. Chapter 3

3

"Gooshie!" Admiral Al Calavicci stood outside the Collins family Mausoleum. Using his comlink to project a beam of light through the darkness, he wished he could use it to fast forward into day. "What's that out there? What? Sam? What kept you?!"

"I am not..." Sam passed his hand through Al several times. He tried to recatch his breath after running from the bar back to this creepy desolate cemetery. "A hologram. Now, come on." He looked back to him as he entered the mausoleum.

"But I don't want to go in there." Al cringed and called to the computer programmer in his time period creating this hologram of the past around him. "Gooshie, you better light it up in there! I want it to look like daylight!!" He hesitantly entered the creepy tomb. The light off the comlink bounced off the three crypts and around the vault before it fell on the tombstone of Sara Collins. The sight of the marker reading 1786 to 1796 made him realize how young she was when she went as he remembered his own little sister who died at the same age.

"Al, come on." Sam beckoned to him. "Does Ziggy have any info on these Collins?"

"What? Oh, sure." Al read the data coming over his comlink. "Let's see here, Joshua Collins was the grandson of town founder, Isaac Collins. The records of the time are a little sketchy, but one account says he had three sons, Barnabas, Jeremiah and Daniel, and a daughter, Sara, who died of consumption."

"Barnabas." Sam remembered the name. "Is he an ancestor of the modern Barnabas?"

"Ziggy has no data there, but... it sounds like a reasonable assumption." Al looked up at the tools lying about and then the open crypt door to a dark secret room. "What's that?"

"Oh," Sam became a history expert. "In Revolutionary times, wealthy families, like the Collins, probably used hiding places like this to store things, like guns, supplies, valuables..."

"And dead bodies." Thunder cracked as Al pointed with his cigar to the chain-covered casket.

"Well, if you were going to put riches in a crypt, wouldn't you conceal them in a casket over a chest." Sam reasoned.

"Oh really," Al became sarcastic. "Explain the chains."

"To keep people out." Sam continued. "Well, I bet that Loomis figured out the same thing and was robbing it when I leaped into him."

"No," Al was skeptical. "What I believe is that Dracula is in there and he wants to jump out and suck the blood out of half of Collinsport!"

"No, no, no, no, no…" Sam hated these weird horror tangents that Al got into. "Like I've told you a million times. There are no such things as ghosts, witches and vampires! Just get that stupid idea out of your head. I'm not arguing the ridiculous semantics of the possibility of the paranormal with you here and now!"

"Sam," Al read the comlink again and smugly and sarcastically looked up to his buddy living the life of Willie Loomis. "Ziggy says there is a..." He giggled nervously. "Heartbeat coming from...." He giggled nervously again. "The casket."

"Well, it's old, maybe there's a hole in the bottom and a rat is stuck inside."

"And if you believe that." Al looked back. "I have a bridge to sell you."

"Look," Sam picked up the crowbar. "There is nothing inside this casket except maybe the lost Collins fortune, some decaying matter and maybe a rat."

"Sam, someone put those chains on for a reason!" Al argued. "I have seen a lot of horror movies where..."

"I'm opening the coffin!" Sam put the crowbar in place rather than listen to a hologram that believed in ghosts and vampires..

"No, Sam don't do it!" Al's eyes rounded as the rusted chain snapped and rattled to the ground. "Someone put those chains on there for a reason!"

"You are going to feel so stupid in a min..." A hand sprang from the coffin and grabbed Sam by the throat. Al froze to the spot as thunder cracked and the dark presence in the casket rose up.

"Sam!!" Al watched Sam overwhelmed by the huge shadow rising up from the concrete encased coffin. "My gawd! Barnabas Collins IS Barnabas Collins. The crowbar, Sam, hit him with it! Oh my gawd, I hope vampires can't see holograms from the future..."

Standing in his dust-strewn and old-fashioned period clothing, Barnabas Collins dropped the grave robber in the tomb as just another thief. Why did things seem so different? How long was he out? The last thing he remembered was his father placing him in the tomb. Thinking he heard another voice, he left the stranger to his feet and went out to look around for witnesses. He was going to need answers and he might as well kept this person alive long enough to provide those answers, but first he needed to search the area. Was it a few days later? A few months? A year? How long had he been trapped in the coffin?!

"Sam!" Al screamed at his buddy on the floor. "You need to stop him and kill him, he's........." He glanced at the comlink. "Hey, the Collins family's back alive in the future. Now, how could that have happened? Was Loomis SUPPOSED to open the tomb?" The images around him winked out from around him and Al found himself back in the empty imaging chamber while Sam Beckett leaped again into another life. The flash of light and sounds of decades overwhelmed Doctor Beckett for a minute as his essence replaced the life of another person and his vision returned to him. Clad in old-fashioned period clothing, he looked up to a man in a powdered wig. He felt a little out of it from both the blow to his head and the leap. It looked much further than he had ever leaped back. He just hoped that this was an Amish community in the Fifties or a movie set as before.

"Peter Bradford," A man spoke to him from a judge's bench before him. "Your client, Victoria Winters, is being tried for the crime of witchcraft. How does she plead?" He turned and noticed the lovely brunette ingénue by his side. She was short and petite with white alabaster skin and long dark hair.

"Witchcraft?" He wondered how far back he had gone. This couldn't possibly be the Salem witch trials. He couldn't leap back this far, but yet, the evidence was around him in the form of the courthouse, the old clothes and a sinister priest playing the role of prosecutor across from him.

"Oh, boy..............."


	4. Chapter 4

4

Sam's jaw dropped at the sight of the muddy streets and horse-drawn carriages. He had bluffed his way through Victoria's arraignment, but finding himself in the Eighteenth Century was probably more than he could handle. He thought he could not leap out of his lifetime, but the reality of the surroundings seemed to refute that. There wasn't a sign of anything modern or native to the Twentieth century. Horses pulled carriages over muddy, snow filled streets and the locals were dressed in boring gray and withered brown. Kerosene laps were bolted to the front of stories. In the middle of the street, a Navy Admiral in a bright white uniform popped out of nowhere in the muddy street.

"Sam!" Al appeared in the path of the horses as they passed through him. "Oh, thank god, we found you."

"Al!" Sam stepped into an alley off the way. "What happened?! Where am I?!!"

"You're still in Collinsport, but now it's January 9,1795." Al looked at the comlink. "That guy you leaped into in the drawing room is pretty shaken up. He keeps asking about Vicki."

"He's defending her on a charge of witchcraft." Sam looked at his reflection in the window. He looked like an actor he knew named Kevin Bacon!

"How did I get here?"

"Well, Ziggy has a wild theory. What do you know about a quantum causality?" Al asked him.

"Well, theoretically, it would be a place where quantum particles are being exchanged from two different parts in time..."

"Exactly, but not just in time, but in space." Al continued. "On May 18,1999, a parapsychologist named David Collins documented a room in Collinwood that jumped between alternate quantum realities. Ziggy thinks that what he found is really a quantum causality so that when you leaped..."

"I got sucked in and dropped out at this point in time when it was at is weakest point." Sam realized. "This must be when Collinwood was built. All I have to do is leap and I'll snap back to my lifetime, providing I never leap anywhere near Collinwood again. I must be here to help Vicki."

"There's another weird thing, Sam." Al hedged a bit. "There's also a Victoria Winters in 1967..........."

"She must be a descendant." Sam reasoned. "How do I help this Victoria Winters?"

"It's not going to be easy." Al continued. "Witchcraft trials are impossible to win. However, Ziggy has access to criminal law records, archived Salem Witch trials records and old jury transcripts. She thinks your best bet is to pull a Johnny Cochran."

"A what?"

"Johnny Cochran. He defended O.J. Simpson in that murder case."

"O.J. Simpson killed someone?"

"This is not the time." Al frustratingly glared back. "You have to go into that courtroom tomorrow and make the case so sticky, so complicated, so confused that no one can win. Keep every one so turned around they won't know left from right!"

"That can't possibly work."

"It got Simpson off." Al puffed on his cigar.


	5. Chapter 5

5

"Peter, I don't understand what you're up to." Vicki replied back in court with the man she thought was Peter Bradford..

"Good." Sam looked back at her. "Maybe they can't figure it out either." The judged pounded the gavel to start the court into session. Several members of the Collins family were in attendance as were several townspeople connected to the family. Several of those in attendance were even just trying to get out of the cold.

"Mr. Bradford, you have the floor." the judge remarked.

"Yes, your honor." Sam started. "I just wanted to ask if the honorable Reverend Trask was prepared for trial."

"I am ready." the witch-hunter insisted.

"But I thought you would have collected all of my client's alleged compatriots."

"As far as I know, the witch Victoria Winters worked alone."

"Your honor." Sam turned to the judge's bench. "If Reverend Trask is going to pin a crime of witchcraft on my client, I want him to prove it. I want to him to have the devil confirm that she is working for him."

"What?!!!" Trask bounded to his feet as the court became filled with whispers and secrets. The judge pounded his gavel

"Mr. Bradford." the judge started. "What sort of prank is this?"

"Trask wants us to believe my innocent client has been behind the misfortunes at Collinwood." Sam spoke out of Peter Bradford. "If he wants this court to believe she is an instrument of the devil, I want him to prove in a court of law that the devil exists."

The courtroom began buzzing once more.

"The Bible says he exists!!" Trask waved the book around. "What other proof is there."

"Your honor!" Sam reacted. "With all due respect, it is not the Bible accusing Miss Winters of witchcraft, but Reverend Trask's translations of it!" He paused and continued. "Now, my client and I are both God-fearing people. She is being accused of crimes for which she has no apparent motive and the honorable Reverend Trask is still straining to find one. Now, this..." He smirked a minute. "Is the age of enlightenment. This is the Eighteenth Century. We do not believe in ghosts, witches and monsters. I can bring in ten books to prove the devil does not exist, but I seek more to decrease the court's time in this travesty than to increase it."

The room buzzed with whispers and innuendo again as the judges whispered amongst them.

"You raise interesting questions, Mr. Bradford." The main judge looked down. "Mr. Trask, are you ready to counter these claims?"

"No, your honor. Not at this time."

"Then I will bide by Mr. Bradford's proposal." the judge continued. "We will resume at this time tomorrow. Court is recessed at this time." The room started breaking up as Sam turned to Vicki.

"That's one for our side." He remarked to Victoria then turned to the few Collins family members ready to watch the proceedings. Among them, Joshua Collins was present to watch the proceedings. The stern mutton-chopped old patriarch gently and lightly guided his wife Naomi ahead of him as the man he thought was Peter Bradford approached.

"Mr. Collins," Sam confronted the grieving father of Barnabas Collins. "May I borrow your man, Ben Stokes?"

"Yes, whatever for?"

"I want him to take a message to Boston." Sam grinned behind hid façade of Peter Bradford. "It could be very helpful in my case to protect Mrs. Winters." He stood proudly in his period clothing.


	6. Chapter 6

6

As Peter Bradford, Sam Beckett still ran circles around the Reverend Trask by preaching religious doctrine and challenging the existence of witchcraft and the devil. Trask in return was turning the courtroom into a church going into sermons every now and then. The judge had become a mediator between their screaming fits as Victoria barely kept up with the arguments herself.

"Anyone who does not believe in God is a disciple of the devil!" Trask screamed for the thousandth time in so many days.

"Then by your rules," Beckett became clever again. "The Jews, Hindus, Moslems and everyone else are devil-worshippers and last time I checked, there are more of them in existence than there are of us! Maybe worshippers of faiths older than Christianity know something we don't.""

"Mr. Bradford." the judge rubbed his temples as he exhaustively poured another cup of water. "For the last time, we are not here to debate the existence of the devil. We are here to try a case of witchcraft."

"Your honor," Sam looked back. "There are no such things as witches. And if by the furthest remote chance there is, and there isn't, there was a lot of people coming and going through Collinwood for the marriage of Barnabas Collins and Josette DuPres. Why was she singled out?! On the misguided, heart-broken whims of one religious fanatic named Abigail Collins, a woman so afraid of everything that she would concoct this conspiracy against the one person who had nothing to gain. I can name up to three people with something more to gain by the death of Victoria Winters."

"Objection!" Trask yelled.

"Where is the logic in that??!" Beckett yelled back as the courtroom doors opened. Ben Stokes ushered in another figure dressed in black with the arraignments of a man of God.

"Your honor." Sam turned to the judge. "I desire to place a witness on the stand to plead in Victoria's defense."

"Who is this witness?"

"The Arch-diocese Father Quentin Selby of Holy Margaret's Church in Boston."

"Objection." Trask repeated his favorite word. "This man does not know Mrs. Winters."

"But he is the leading authority of the time in religious history and the practice of pagan religions." Sam answered.

"Your honor?!" Trask rebuked.

"Anything to hear the voice of another person." The judge was popping pills from the local druggist. Father Selby was sworn in as whispers abounded in the courtroom. Even Abigail Collins leaned over to Trask and whispered something.

"I apologize for the inconvenience, Father Selby." Sam started.

"It's no problem." The Archdiocese was sort of a handsome figure with blue eyes and thick sideburns tinged with silver. He seemed a bit younger but for the traces of time upon him.

"The well-renown Reverend Trask is trying to make us believe that my client Victoria Winters is a witch. From the evidence I sent you, is it likely?"

"The Catholic Church makes no standings that the devil is real." Selby testified. "It does, however, have certain retributions that so-called witches be reconverted to live in a Christian society."

"In a sense," Sam continued. "It is better to rehabilitate mystics than killing them and making them martyrs for a cause. Do you believe Mrs. Winters is a witch?"

"No." The Archdiocese continued. "But she has obviously been framed for a series of unfortunate random incidents."

"And your opinion of Reverend Trask?"

"A heretic and a madman posing as a man of God."

Trask began screaming as the judge pounded his gavel harder and harder. The room was filled with whispers and innuendos as the judge tried to regain order.

"Mr. Trask!" the judge started. "This farce has gone on enough! I am going to throw this case out unless you come up with substantial proof of your claims! Do you have any questions for this witness?!!"

"I have my own testimony to read into the record." Trask picked up a book from his table as the Archdiocese left the stand. He glared toward Sam as he flashed a book in his presence. The title in gold letters read "A History of the Collins Family."

"Mr. Bradford." Trask smirked with an evil lust. "You want proof of the devil! Here it is from the handwriting of your own client! 'My name is Victoria Winters. By forces I do not understand, I have been thrust back into time to the year 1795.............'"

Sam was speechless as he glanced back to Vicki. The lovely ingenue went into shock as her own words were used against her. He wondered to himself. Could she herself be another time-traveler?!!


	7. Chapter 7

7

Sam was lead by the jailer into the jail under the courthouse. He looked at Vicki in the cell reading the Bible he had given her under the cross on the wall and by the solitary light of her tiny window at street level. Both had been a ploy to dissuade the feelings of the community, but Trask reading that history of the future did a lot of damage. Sam looked into her eyes trying to get a feel of her feelings and innocence. Was she the same Victoria Winters that Al said lived at Collinwood in 1967? How could it be possible?

"Vicki," Sam started. "Where are you from? The truth."

"I told you, Peter." She replied. "Last week, remember..."

"Well, convince me again." Sam wasn't there when Victoria had confessed to Peter.

"I'm the governess for the Collins Family in 1967." Vicki admitted seriously with such a straight tone she couldn't have been lying to him.

"I told you, Sam." The invisible hologram of Admiral Al Calavicci now stood nearby. Sam was the only one to notice him.

"But how..." Sam looked briefly at him a second then back to Victoria. "Did you get here?"

"Sara's ghost was haunting the estate." Vicki held the Bible in her hands. "We wanted to know why she was not at rest, but there was a burst of wind, and the candles went out. I think I passed out, but when I woke up, I was here... in this time... wandering the grounds of the main house as it was being built."

"Sam," Al was checking her facts. "Ziggy found another parapsychological article on Collinwood. It seems that there's a legend in 1840 about a Quentin Collins allegedly created a stairway for traveling through time by using the quantum causality in Collinwood. Alledgedly, if it exists, according to the article, he could descend through it to other times, but none of the family could ever find it. She may have accidentally stumbled on it unwittingly if it actually exists."

"Peter," Vicki continued. "I have never been so scared in my whole life. I miss my own time, I miss Carolyn, Mrs. Stoddard and even little David, and now, I may never see them again!" She stood crying on Sam's shoulder. "Oh, Peter, you don't know what it's like to be away from your own time!!!" She broke up weeping.

"Actually, I do..." Sam started.

"No, Sam!" Al snapped to attention. "Don't you dare!!"

"Vicki," Sam took her and wiped her tears with his thumbs delicately. "I do understand..."

"Sam!!!!" Al tried to scold him.

"Who you're looking at is not Peter Bradford." Sam continued as Al sighed and gave up. "What you're looking at is actually a quantum phasic signature of Peter Bradford. My real name is Dr. Samuel Beckett, and I've been traveling through time myself, leaping in and of other people's life like this for years, changing things for the better...."

"Peter, you're scaring me!" Vicki's tearful eyes widened in fear. "You're making this up to tease me!!"

"I'm sorry," Sam pleaded. "But you're not alone! I was a boy when President Kennedy was shot, President Nixon resigning, the fall of the Wall in Berlin!!" He paused trying to figure out if that was the Eighties or the Nineties. "My god, I've even leaped into Willie Loomis, Carolyn's husband!" Vicki looked up. Carolyn and Willie get married in the future?!

"Vicki, I understand what you're living through." Sam continued. "My god, how many Eighteenth Century lawyers even know about quantum physics?"

"Peter?" Vicki was in shock as she backed from him. "This just can't be true." She started breaking up emotionally, losing her grip with reality.

"Vicki," Sam pleaded to her. "I'm from your future!!! I'm here to help you!" He looked at her. She looked at him as if he was mad.

"Sam," Al looked at the comlink and back. "I think you've lost her!" He looked back at Vicki as she suddenly found her support, grabbed Sam and started crying over his shoulder. He lost a few tears himself as he consoled her.

"You're not alone." Sam consoled her and spoke assuredly. "I'm here to help, and one way or another, I'm going to get you home!!!!" Vicki clung to him with tears of fear turning to tears of fearful joy. If she could come from the future, could Peter, or this Sam Beckett, come from her future??!!!


	8. Chapter 8

8

The sun was setting as Ben Stokes hurried for the Old House. His time was short and brief as his master preferred him there when he arrived. He just reached the front landing as he heard someone yelling his name.

"Ben!" Peter Bradford came charging out of the woods. "Ben! I need your help!!"

"No!" Ben grabbed the door. "You can't come in here! The sun's almost down!" He slammed the front entry shut, but it caught on his Bradford's boot. Struggling for the door to open, Sam Beckett continued his masquerade as the Eighteenth Century lawyer as he struggled his way into the Old House. Shoving his way in, he nearly knocked Stokes to the floor.

"Ben," Sam pleaded. "You have to help me save Vicki!"

"I can't!" Ben tried to ignore him. "Don't you see...I'm still under the real witch's control. She'd kill me if I said anything."

"Look!" Sam lurched the unshaven fat man around to face him. "There are no such things as witches. The only power she has is your belief in her powers! If you realize that, she can't control you!!"

"You're pretty stupid, Mr. Bradford!" Ben chuckled. "She's real! I've felt her powers!! She turned Joshua Collins into a cat! She forced Josette and Jeremiah to marry! She even forced Josette from the edge at Widow's Cliff!! She does have power!!!!"

"No!" Sam felt he was arguing with Al. "Those things were coincidences. She made you believe what she wanted you to believe!"

"You don't know, you don't know..." Ben mumbled as he heard something. "You have to get out of here now!!"

"Stokes!" Sam pinned him to one of the pillars in the parlor. "You know as well as I do that Victoria is innocent! You have to tell the court what you know! How could you possibly live with her death on your conscience! Can you live with yourself knowing you let an innocent woman be murdered by crimes she never committed?!!"

"I can't, I can't!"

"Yes, you can!!" Sam screamed at him!

"No, he can't." Another voice answered. Sam looked to the hall down from the foyer. Another figure stood before the wrought iron door to the cellar. He had an aristocratic poise and a gaunt expression of somber expression. At his side was a wolf headed cane being held with ferocious determination. He resembled another man from another of Sam's leaps, a lost face in a Swiss-cheesed mind that he could not remember.

"Mr. Collins?" Sam stepped back. "I thought you were in England."

"You were made to believe that." Barnabas looked to Ben. "Did you take care of those things?"

"Almost."

"Finish them." Barnabas turned to Sam.

"Mr. Collins." Sam spoke calmly now. "You must help me save Victoria." He suddenly remembered where he had seen Barnabas Collins before. It was a frenzied face in a coffin in 1967 that had attacked him and nearly left him near dead. He gasped at the realization. Thank god, Al wasn't here to seem him alive in this room, in this century. Al would never let him forget that he was right..

"I'm afraid I can't." Barnabas lit some candles. "If but I could, I would, but I cannot allow myself to be seen."

"Your medical condition?" Sam guessed with a wry grin to turn this situation to his advantage with his knowledge of the future. "It keeps you from going into sunlight?"

"Medical condition?" It had caused a reaction as Barnabas stopped and went into a trance. "I suppose it could be called that."

"Mr. Collins," Sam carefully and cautiously stood from him. "If I set the right conditions for you to come into court and speak, would you help?"

"What sort of conditions?" Barnabas peered back distrustfully.


	9. Chapter 9

9

"Mr. Bradford," the judge exhaustively took his seat in the nearly abandoned courtroom. The only other individuals were Trask, Victoria and a few witnesses. "This better be important to open court preceding at this late time."

"Anytime is a good time to save a innocent person." Beckett grinned cleverly. It was still early night out as he started. "Your honor, it is more than obvious to me that we have reached a stalemate. The honorable Reverend Trask and myself have both created cases that both can condemn or save Victoria Winters, but we have still not heard from the one person who can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the identity of the alleged so-called witch."

"And who is this witness?" Trask looked sideways to Sam.

"Barnabas Collins!"

The few witnesses became alarmed as Joshua Collins sat up and headed up. Trask began yelling as well.

"Barnabas Collins is dead!!" Trask argued. "Murdered by the witch! Buried secretly by a grieving father."

"No!!" Sam responded. "When this farce of a trial began, I sent a small craft to overtake Mr. Collins ship and return him. That's why I called the late trial and to put an end to this trial so Miss Winters would not spend another minute in jail for the crimes of another! He is now here!!"

Everyone's heads turned to the massive opening doors. Stoic and unimpressed, Barnabas strode up to the witness stand to be sworn in. Flanked by his father and Ben Stokes, he glared at Trask as he passed him.

"Looks good for a dead man, doesn't he?" Sam chuckled in Trask's direction. On the stand, Barnabas eyed the Bible hesitantly as he took the oath. He sat down with his hands before him on his cane.

"Mr. Collins," Sam started. "I apologize for the lateness of the hour, and for dragging you back from your journey, but... was there anyone who could remotely be called a witch at Collinwood?"

"Yes," he admitted. "My late wife, Angelique Bouchard." The room gasped with whispers and innuendoes.

"Where is she now?"

"Buried in an unmarked grave." Barnabas admitted. "I killed her."

A female voice screamed in the back of the room.

"Because she was a witch...."

"Because she killed my beloved Josette." Barnabas barely looked up. "She was..............my one true love."

"Objection!" Trask screamed. "Angelique Bouchard is not here to testify in her defense."

"Be kind of hard to testify for a dead woman, wouldn't it, Reverend Trask?" Sam replied as the judge allowed his statement. He turned back round to see Barnabas.

"Do you believe Victoria is a witch?" Sam asked the alleged vampire.

"No."

"Your witness." Sam turned away. Everyone turned to Trask as he sat brooding. He looked pretty foolish now after screaming and testifying that Victoria had killed Barnabas.

"Reverend?" The judge looked down to Trask.

"No questions." The witch-hunter mumbled.

"If you have no further evidence, then I will end this and pass sentence now."

"But the b..." Trask suddenly lost his voice.

"What was that?" the judge looked at Trask.

"He's asking about Angelique's body." Sam guessed.

"Come by the Old House." Barnabas hurriedly passed the Reverend. "I'll show you the grave."

"Victoria Winters." the judge continued. "Since the Reverend has not been able to show just cause, I'm dismissing this case. You are freed of all charges and may not be tried again." Victoria sat in shock a minute. Sam gasped for relief as Trask glared at him with the ferocity of the devil himself.

"You…" his voice was stifled as if someone had been choking him. "Have not won this!" He gathered his case of papers and stood up. Sam just ignored him as Victoria jumped into his arms.

"Sam," she whispered to him. "You did it. But how do I get to my own time?"

"I'm still working on it.." Sam peered back upon her as Naomi Collins came to offer her condolences. Despite the end, Sam turned to Trask walking out disgustedly and wondered if things were truly over now.


	10. Chapter 10

10

Back at Eagle Hill, Sam Beckett was in the mausoleum helping Stokes put the chains on Barnabus's tomb. Joshua held the lantern close to his face and cast an eerie glow on the spectacle over the clandestine subterfuge. Barnabas Collins was in the tomb and in Sam's mind he was laying it out ready for Willie Loomis to find it in the future.

"Thank you, Mr. Bradford." Joshua spoke. "You're one of the few most trustworthy individuals I've ever met. You'll be repaid for this trust."

"That's not necessary, sir." Sam beamed with humility and turned on his heel. Headed out of the crypt, he stopped and paused before it realizing what it looked like in 1967 when Willie Loomis would be here to open it. Al was outside as well waiting for the closure.

"You should have killed him." Al told him.

"I'm not getting into this whole vampire thing, but somehow, someway, his destiny is in the Twentieth Century." Sam replied. "I can't explain exactly what is going on here, but, I know he can get cured there and have a normal life." He paused. "Why haven't I leaped?"

"Let's see," Al raised the comlink. "Ziggy can't get a lock on Vicki. Gooshie says she's back in 1967. This is interesting... she marries Peter Bradford in 1968, but their son is born in 1801."

"She comes back?"

"Apparently." Al puffed on his cigar. "Can't get a lock on Trask either. He's missing. Joshua Collins raises his last surviving son Daniel alone and he has three children: Josette Collins in 1810, Quentin Collins in 1812 and Gabriel Collins in 1814..........." There was a record in the comlink about another Barnabas Collins in 1840 and another with Gabriel's heirs in 1897. Was it another descendant, or was Barnabas released and imprisoned two more times?

"Well," Sam talked out loud as he and Al wandered down the hill from the mausoleum. "If Vicki's safe, Trask is gone and Barnabus's future is preserved, why haven't I leaped?"

"Because I'm keeping you here, Dr. Beckett." A figure emerged out of the shadow of the caretaker's cottage. She was tall and blonde and very beautiful. She wore a very modern mink wrap and tailored clothes foreign to this century.

"Sam," Al looked at his comlink. "This is Angelique Bouchard.......... She's the witch…"

"But, I thought you said she was dead."

"Very astute, Admiral Kalavicci." A Martinique accent bounced on her words. "Former witch, however…" A proud grin formed on her lips.

"You know who I..." Sam stopped where he was as her royal blue eyes scanned over him. "You can see him ?"

"Of course," Angelique grinned in Al's direction as she took Sam's arm to escort her. "When Barnabas finally accepted me as his wife and took my hand in marriage in 1971, I promised him any gift in the world in addition to my everlasting love and devotion. When he asked that I save Josette, I balked and we finally settled on fair Mrs. Winters. That's why I leaped you into Bradford, and myself into my counterpart in this time. Otherwise, my counterpart in this time would have killed you the second you arrived."

"You still going to kill me?" Sam asked. Angelique giggled as if she were amused by these misunderstandings.

"I'm not the person I was once in this time." Angelique smiled. "The sinking of the Titanic taught me that. Yes, I lived through that too." She gazed deeply upon Sam rapturously as if she were forcing him to fall in love with her. "When you leap, you will take Peter Bradford with you to rendezvous with Vicki in the future, and without you, he and Vicki will fall in love as they are meant to, and they will once again return to meet their destinies here in the past. Good bye, Dr. Beckett."

Angelique watched the brilliant flash of light envelope Sam, and then Al standing by him, but instead of leaving Bradford behind to ponder what he was doing here, they all vanished. Al just winked out as well when his link was severed. Angelique looked up to the mausoleum on the hill.

"My dearest Barnabas," she replied. "Selfish, I may be... Cruel and cold perhaps... but I was never evil." She spoke from her heart. "If a woman's heart drives her to do strange things, let it be know that all I did, was for love." She paused looking out over these events from her past. "Dinner will be on the table for you and our babies as I return to our time."

END


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